A detailed account of politics in Ghana's urban neighborhoods, providing a new way to understand African democracy and development.

This book evaluates the global status and prospects of democracy, with an emphasis on the quality of democratic institutions and the effectiveness of governance as key conditions for stable democracy. Bringing together a wide range of the author’s work over the past three decades, it advances a framework for assessing the quality of democracy and it analyzes alternative measures of democracy. Drawing on the most recent data from Freedom House, it assesses the global state of democracy and freedom, as of the beginning of 2015, and it explains why the world has been experiencing a mild but now deepening recession of democracy and freedom since 2005. A major theme of the book across the three decades of the author’s work is the relationship between democratic quality and stability. Democracies break down, Diamond argues, not so much because of economic factors but because of corrupt, inept governance that violates individual rights and the rule of law. The best way to secure democracy is to ensure that democracy is accountable, transparent, genuinely competitive, respectful of individual rights, inclusive of diverse forms and sources of participation, and responsive to the needs and aspirations of ordinary citizens. Viable democracy requires not only a state that can mobilize power to achieve collective goals, but also one that can restrain and punish the abuse of power—a particularly steep challenge for poor countries and those with natural resource wealth. The book examines these themes both in broad comparative perspective and with a deeper analysis of historical trends and future prospects in Africa and Asia,. Concluding with lessons for sustaining and reforming policies to promote democracy internationally, this book is essential reading for students and scholars interested in democracy, as well as politics and international relations more generally.

This title was first published in 2001. When Ghana became independent in 1957, becoming the first country in Sub-Saharan Africa to banish colonialism, there was a general optimism that irreversible socio-economic development was about to unfold. But by the end of the 1970s Ghana paradoxically became the first country in Twentieth Century Africa to have experienced socio-economic decline. What failed Ghana? This book seeks to answer this question. By combining sociological, economic, political and institutional perspectives, this book focuses on the interplay between state politics and socio-economic development. It provides a model, which suggests that Ghana’s postcolonial development has suffered mainly as a result of the failure or inability of governing elites to develop consensual politics and a clearly specified long-term development objective that could be widely understood, accepted and have relevance for policy making. This book presents a much-needed self-assessment of the post-colonial development experience which contends that governance, economic management and institution building are basic challenges without which the search for development is likely to falter.

This book provides the first comprehensive overview of the history of democracy in Africa and explains why the continent's democratic experiments have so often failed, as well as how they could succeed. Nic Cheeseman grapples with some of the most important questions facing Africa and democracy today, including whether international actors should try and promote democracy abroad, how to design political systems that manage ethnic diversity, and why democratic governments often make bad policy decisions. Beginning in the colonial period with the introduction of multi-party elections and ending in 2013 with the collapse of democracy in Mali and South Sudan, the book describes the rise of authoritarian states in the 1970s; the attempts of trade unions and some religious groups to check the abuse of power in the 1980s; the remarkable return of multiparty politics in the 1990s; and finally, the tragic tendency for elections to exacerbate corruption and violence.